Posts Tagged: Fiction Prize

We are excited to announce that judge Aimee Bender has selected “Nothing Before Something” by Kimberly King Parsons as the winner of Indiana Review’s 2016 Fiction Prize! Thank you to everyone who submitted their work and made this year’s prize possible. “Nothing Before Something” will appear in our Winter 2017 issue.

2016 Fiction Prize Winner:

“Nothing Before Something” by Kimberly King Parsons

Aimee Bender says about the winning piece: “This was a tough decision; there were a lot of very fine stories in the mix here. I picked “Nothing Before Something” as the winner because it kept pulling me to it, pulling me in. Even if I tried to read fast, the natural movement of the narration forced me to slow down, and, paradoxically, there was urgency behind the sentences that created part of this slowing, a drive in Sheila that connects to emotional power. A lot of this is that elusive thing–voice. The author clearly knows how to make sentences that are unique, but that distinctiveness is all in the service of giving us a person, this Sheila, in a moment of her life, driven toward Tim as she negotiates the world of suffering—her own, and that of others, too. Basically, I just read along happily and I would’ve happily read more. There’s even a slightly sprawly messy feeling here too which seems hopeful to me, like this writer can keep trying stuff out and trusting the power of voice and valuing where it naturally leads. Readers are in for a real treat.”

Indiana Review is proud to announce the winners of our 2015 #IRFictionPrize Twitter Contest! From the classic pig pun to pig references in literature, we received some brilliant and inspirational tweets and enjoyed reading each one. After some careful deliberation we chose two winners who will receive an IR prize pack.

While getting ready to submit your short fiction to our 2015 Fiction Prize, read our interview with 2014 winner, E. E. Lyons, selected by Roxane Gay. Here, she discusses her winning story “The Passeur,” the short story writers who inspire her, and advice for 2015 Fiction Prize entrants–and a fact about her story that might surprise you.

E. E. Lyons is a fiction writer currently based in Washington, DC. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2015 William Randolph Hearst Foundation Creative Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review, Madcap Review, The Fiddleback, and Columbia Poetry Review.

Our 2015 Fiction Prize Judge is Laura van den Berg, whose story “Where We Must Be” first appeared in Indiana Review 29.1 and was republished online at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. In this interview, she answers questions about her short story collection, The Isle of Youth, allergies to boredom, and what she might be looking for in the prize-winning entry.

Laura van den Berg is the author of the novel Find Me and the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth. She is the recent recipient of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize, and an O. Henry Award. She currently lives in Brooklyn, where she is at work on a new collection of stories and a novel.